Football is over, and the end may be near

One Sunday every winter football fans and party-going pretenders gather, ostensibly to watch some of the finer athletes on the planet along with remarkably agile large men knock each others’ brains out.
The unfortunate reality is that those football players are effectively doing just that. The link between football and traumatic brain injury is established, perhaps not absolutely, but that’s only because little is absolute until it is entirely too late.
It is entirely too late for Mike Webster, the NFL Hall of Famer who won four Super Bowl rings with the Pittsburgh Steelers, was dead at 50, and is the first player whose dementia was attributed to the game he played for half his life. His posthumously-examined brain was said to have suffered trauma equivalent to 25,000 car crashes.
Iron Mike was also the first in the lengthening list of former football players diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disorder associated with repetitive head trauma.
It is true that from the professional game on down, measures have been taken, or forced, in recent years to try to reduce brain injuries, and unlike back in Mike’s day players no longer use their helmeted heads as battering rams.
Officials at every level are on the lookout for concussions, and players are not allowed to return to play until they have cleared a concussion protocol. But, CTE researchers have determined that the condition can occur absent a history of concussion.
A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the brains of 110 out of 111 deceased NFL players examined showed CTE. Possibly as startling were the results from players whose careers never went beyond high school or college.
CTE was present in 87 per cent of the 202 brains from men who had played football at levels ending in high school up to the NFL. CTE is only detectable, with certainty, by posthumous examination of the brain which accounts for the relatively small numbers studied.
In life, CTE has been linked to suicide, dementia, mood disorders, anxiety, headaches, and impaired memory. Those symptoms are frequently accompanied by self-medication with alcohol or drugs.
Many ex-pros, plenty of former college players and more high school football players never develop these symptoms, but the incidence of life-diminishing and ending head injuries in football is strong enough to attract attention from law makers and self-preserving action from the football business.
The National Football League is one of the richest sports entertainment organizations in world, generating more than $13 billion annually, so the $100 million it recently tossed to researchers searching for technology to make the game safer for players was no hardship.
Law makers in at least two American states are considering outlawing full contact football for kids under 13, and parents in Canada and the US are becoming increasingly hesitant to sign those permission slips leagues need before allowing kids to strap on a helmet that will save their skull but hasn’t proven effective at protecting the grey matter that bounces around inside that skull.
For some of us, football is a ritual, if not a religion. Hockey is more Canadian, but not worthy of much notice until American football ends on the first weekend of February with a single game that regularly fails to deliver on its over-hyped expectations.
But whether it’s a great game or a lopsided romp, when it’s over what’s left of winter seems longer and next Labor Day is too distant to even contemplate. Fortunately, summer offers other distractions, and when a cool bite returns to the evening air, it will smell like football again.
But the future of the game is threatened by the violent nature of the game. Even in America where baseball is the national pastime, football remains the national passion, but an estimated 250,000 fewer kids are playing minor football than just five years ago.
Maybe a sport that sends too many of its heroes into an exile of agony and desperation isn’t worth the price. I wonder what Mike Webster, or Junior Seau, Bubba Smith, Andre Waters, Kenny Stabler, Earl Morrall, Dave Duerson and so many more would say about that, if they were here to tell us.